Secrets: Radiotopia | radiotopia.fmSweetness and Desire: A Short History of Sugar (BBC Radio 4) | iPlayerBBC World Hacks: Babies Teaching Kindness in Class (BBC World Service) | iPlayer

Podcast network Radiotopia’s new strand, Showcase, features original series from all over the world. You never quite know what you’re getting. The last Showcase series, The Polybius Conspiracy, was addictively enjoyable, but suffered a backlash when listeners realised that its tale wasn’t a real-life story, but a carefully crafted, impeccably researched drama. Personally, I enjoyed being fooled and slowly realising, but others got cross: “I feel so dumb and really disappointed,” said one. “Why didn’t they just say it wasn’t real?”

It’s interesting. Podcasting is still a young medium, and nearly every one of its breakout hits is based on fact. Drama series, such as Homecomingor Limetown, choose realism over flights of fancy – they’re made to seem as though they’re factual. Often, actual works of fiction only become valued once real life is brought in, as with My Dad Wrote a Porno or The Worst Idea of All Time. Facts are a podcasting fundamental.

I was thinking about this while listening to Showcase’s new series, Secrets. We’re two episodes in. Producer Martin Johnson gave the series an eye-rollingly pompous introduction – “We all have them. Secrets. Small precious boxes of memories. Of something that can’t be shared” – but Secrets is an odder, more interesting show than this makes it seem. There are two elements. First, fellow producer Mohamed El Abed gradually reveals his own story of secrets, based around his family. Each episode brings more insights. This is kind of interesting; but only kind of. Far more fascinating is the second element of the show: the interviews that come after Abed’s own story. The first episode featured Neil Woods, a British cop who went undercover as a heroin addict to get evidence on gangster drug dealers. It was astonishingly absorbing. In the second, we heard from Norwegian wildlife photographer Terje Hellesø.

In 2011, the well-respected Hellesø was exposed for making fake photographs of the natural world. In Secrets, he says this: “I’m not that worried about showing something as it looks. To me it’s more important trying to work forward symbolism, personal feelings, more than showing how anything just looked like.” In other words, he fictionalises real life to reveal what he believes to be its truth. But people don’t like that. They want his pictures to be literally true. They want the world to be romantic and astonishing, for real. They want facts, especially where and when they expect them.

Food writer Bee Wilson presents an excellent new series on the history of sugar on Radio 4. Photograph: Amit Lennon/The Observer

For facts, you go to the BBC. And here is food writer Bee Wilson with her excellent new series about sugar, Sweetness and Desire. I very much enjoyed her unpicking of our relationship with this desired and demonised substance: she took in slavery, world wars, ye olde sweete shoppes, and hot sweet tea as a working-class staple. Unfortunately, on Tuesday, one of the expert interviewees referred to Didsbury as “a town close to Leeds”. Didsbury is close to Manchester, as the BBC well knows (most of its up-from-London Salford employees live there or thereabouts). I found her testimony a bit harder to believe after that. The wrong facts can pull you out of your listening enjoyment and make you begin to question what you hear.

Another lovely programme is the World Service’s BBC World Hacks. Last week’s was particularly delightful. Harriet Noble reported from a primary school in Canada, where kindness is being taught to nine-year-olds by a baby: Naomi, seven months. Naomi can’t speak, so the children have to work out how she is feeling from what she does. The children are being taught to care. The results are arresting: three years later, of those children inclined towards bullying, 88% are behaving more kindly. Facts again. We want the world to be extraordinary. Some facts give us hope that it might be.

Trump a year on: shows that take him to task

Jonathan Marcus, the BBC’s defence and diplomatic correspondent, views Trump’s first year from a military perspective. Trump chose a general to head the Pentagon; he promised to end wars he didn’t understand; he pledged to invest in defence. Were his promises empty? Should he be let anywhere near the Big(ger Than Yours) Red Button? This is sober, interesting analysis, with Marcus talking to those who know in the US military. The next two programmes tackle foreign affairs and health. Is the Orange Bloviator actually the Great Disruptor?

Anthony Zurcher looks at the president from the POV Trump loves best: Twitter. Two panels - one rightwing, one left – discuss Trump’s most controversial tweets. Yes, really. You may well regard this as the media eating itself: it’s actually far more revealing (and funny) than you might imagine. The feel is of a US political chatshow, although, wisely, both sides are kept apart. As with most US political chatshows, it can get a bit over-talky, but it’s useful to know how both sides think. You find yourself wondering: what could ever bring them together?

Michael Goldfarb, a distinguished US radio reporter resident in the UK, uses his elegant essay podcast to consider one year of the Trump. Is the president crazy or just a typical country club type? Does the way he talk simply reflect how people talk when they are among friends? Goldfarb turns his beautiful voice and clever mind not only to what Trump has achieved in office, but how he has achieved it. “He has smashed what Americans and the world have come to expect as normal presidential behaviour,” says Goldfarb. He certainly has. MS